I LOVE OLD HOUSES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 419, 4 July 1947, Page 18

I LOVE OLD HOUSES

(Written for "The Listener’ by ~

M.

S.

ON’T get me wrong (if I) may borrow~ from that famous. classicist, Lemmy Caution)! I love old houses. I lap them up as cats lap up milk. : What Father and I, our son Bill, and two young men who hang around after our Molly haven't done to old houses is just mnobody’s business. We have turned old-~ houses inside out and. upside down-and finally ‘transformed them into remote resemblances of the latest thing in bungalows. Father used to

go around looking for decrepit shacks that he could take title to, end then metamorphose! I no sooner had the curtains hung the way I wanted them in one house than Father had seen enother he felt needed his ministrations, and we had to move. Why, one New Year’s Day, after the second glass of post-prandial cherry brandy, I agreed to the demolition of an obtrusive inside chimney which had been annoying Father for some time, and before you could say Hey Presto, or Blow me down, the men had their working clothes on, were up the chimney, and had thrown the first brick! Mind you, I don’t say that I didn’t regret it later, and that my New Year wesn’t a rather grim affair, but that was just my pawkiness about briek dust and ancient dirt! Those men had every brick out of that chimney in less than two days, and no sooner had they finished that job than they began building wails in the garden with the discarded bricks! % * * ES, I love old houses! I love those Saturday mornings when Father, marching up and down like a predatory Napoleon, wonders what improvement he can make next! And he never has to wonder long. Perhaps a few new bookshelves can be added to the sitting room, which I spring-cleaned the previous week, or that leak in the roof, through which the rain poured on to Aunt Emma and the second-best eiderdown can be mended. Or, as a standby, the kitchen can always be given another coat of enamel (there seems to be no limit to these) just as I am in tae middle of the week-end joint (figuratively speaking, of course). No, sir, no brand new bungalows for us. We'd jyst die of ennui there! a i ¢ % UT our latest move is in a somewhat different category from all the others. This particuler Old House is one of those provided by a beneficent Government Department for its deserving employees. In fact, I think it is the original of all such houses! Even §, who have regarded undaunted a tumbledown antique: vi'la of uncertain age, felt a tremor of the heart when I entered the new demesne. And Father, I noticed, was distrait and not himself. It was a

week before he took a hammer in his hand, and then it was only to remove a few rusty and superfluous nails, It isn’t only that he misses his Demolition Squad (for Bill and Molly, and the two Sycophants were left behind in the big city). It isn’t only that ‘this house is not his legally and that workmen will eventually be sent to carry out necessary repairs and alterations. I fear it is the fact that he feels this Old House might be a facer, and that even he and the Demolition Squad might be unable to cope with it in a manner worthy of their prowess! us * ‘y Hs house, like some novels, is in two parts, both of an age reaching far back into the primitive days of this Dominion. The lean-to portion at the back, containing kitchen and _ sitting room, is the more modern, or so we deduce from certain late Victorian embellishments. The really old part consists of four square rooms, two on either ‘side of a narrow passage. In this wing is our dining room, which has a floor so much on the slant that walking on it is like walking on an escalator without steps! The paper here is tattered, stained and so dirty that the colour of the giant roses with which it is patterned is entirely obscured! The hearth, which juts into the room about two feet, serves an open fireplece on which the proverbial ox could be roasted, Tucked into the corner is a cupboard, also so much on the slant that articles placed on it slide from one side to the other. And everywhere there are ratholes, big and small, some covered up with bestencut cigarette tins, some just waiting for the rat to, poke his head through and look at us as if to say, "I was here first!" This room we call the Rat Room. Our bedroom, too, is in this part of the rats playing high jinks in the a above. For we have an attic, a second storey, to which, however, there is no legitimate means of entry. How the original inhabitants reached it is a source of surmise, for there is no sign of any staircase having been removed. "Oh," said Father regretfully, when we first became aware cof the possibility of rooms (continued on next page) Se . house, and at night we can hear ttic .

i 2 a Pigef (continued from previous page) up aloft, "if only I had my boy Frank here I could turn one of those rooms into a study!" The dear man has always wanted a study, but what with children, and Aunt Emma, and small houses, has never been able to have one. "How would you get up there?" I said. "Ona, Frank and I would soon fix that," he replied. Frank is the Construction Ex‘pert of the Squad. Give him two pieces of timber, a hammer, and a saw, and he can produce anything from a Meat Safe to a Motor Garage. * ) # UT a little thing like that wasn’t going to stick Father for long. I could see that his energy was reasserting itself. One Saturday morning he disappeared for an hour, and came home "with an outsize in ladders, and a grim Setermined look. He said, "I’m going \'} up!" "But," I remonstrated, "it may be dangerous-you’d better wait!" "I don’t care if it’s dangerous or not-I’m going up. There may be buried treasure up there!" "Buried" seemed hardly the right word, but I felt it was not the time to argue finer points. The kitchen table had been carried into the passage, the ladder perched precariously on top of it, and Father was on the first rung. "I’d better come too," I said.

"You can come if you like," he said, "but mind your step." He disappeared through the small manhole, and I, with no miserly anticipation of buried treasure, but with a truly feminine instinct for dead romance, followed after. Alas for our hopes of either treasure or romance! We picked a murky way through cobwebs which hung like dirty tattered curtains, from roof to floor. There were two rooms, their sloping walls meeting at a point where a tall man could just stand upright. Straight up through the centre of one came a ubiquitous and uncamouflaged chimney. On the walls, still covered with remnants of paper of Victorian vintage, there were prints pinned-the Combined British Fleet. on manoeuvres in the English Channel, from an Illustrated London News of 1894, and a delightful pastoral from another journal. of the same year. No treasure, no glimmer of a romance-only boxes of rubbish left behind by some previous tenant for the benefit of the rats! The sum total of our discovery was the maiden name of the wife of a tenant, what bra she wore, and what cereals she gave the family for breakfast! Father threw two or three boxes down. through the manhole, "That'll boil the copper next washing day, anyhow!"